


Waxing

by sixpences



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-22
Updated: 2007-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:53:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixpences/pseuds/sixpences
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth on the way to the end of the world, on a clear night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waxing

The wind is high, singing through the rigging and swelling the sails, and the night is perfectly clear. The rolling swells are limned in moonlight, the dark shadow of some distant island just visible below the strange southern stars. The sky has grown more unfamiliar the further they've travelled, bursts of coloured cloud that glow in the heavens and fat white stars that circle heavily around the moon, a too-familiar intruder into this exotic firmament.

Elizabeth sways easily on the yard, loosening the hitch in the gasket with chilly fingers. Night is by far the best time to be aloft; the rigging slips away into drifting shadows and it's easy enough to imagine it's not there at all, only the black air moving feather-light over her skin and the soft cry of the waves below. High above the deck the world is only wind and canvas and the silent sky.

Below, of course, there is the tug of gravity and Will standing abaft of the mast, the light of the moon picking out the pale of his upturned face. Ragetti is hunched over the yard to her right, and as he turns and nods she lets go the knot and the sail soars free, filling with the wind. Ahead, the Pacific rolls on and on and on into the vanishing horizon.

In a different life, Elizabeth has been married for two months. Two months and nineteen days. She is lying entwined in sheets and her husband's arms in the warm cicada night, and the sea only whispers along the shoreline, its secrets held at arm's length. Of course, there is quite another life where she has slept in her bridal bed for over a year, where her fingers wend their way amidst brocade and bullion, and another where the sea has already claimed her and Port Royal lies in ruins for the pirate gold on its harbour floor. Possibility splinters out like the lines running to the deck.

Somewhere, perhaps, there is an Elizabeth who sleeps sound with nary a thought for the rising clang of the ship's bell, an Elizabeth whose nights are not torn between the slap of sea on wood and the insistent heat of maddening dreams, a memory and a phantom touch that leave her to wake to longings she can scarcely name. They are following the sun into the west, long leagues that rush together like the rolling waves, and somewhere beyond where the stars fall into the dark of the sea there is another splinter point, another die to roll.

But tonight the moon is waxing still, and all she can hear is the roaring of the wind.


End file.
